Usage of an Association class in Rational Rhapsody

Technote (FAQ)

Question

Cause

You would like to know what is an Association class and how it is rendered.

Answer

An association class is used to model an association as a class. Association classes often occur in many-to-one and many-to-many associations where the association itself has attributes.

As an example, consider a many-to-many association between classes Person and Company. The association could have properties; e.g. salary, jobClassification, startDate, etc. In this case, the association is more correctly modeled as an association class with attributes rather than trying to fold the attributes into one of the classes in the association.

An association class is rendered by a dashed line from the association to the class rectangle.

In UML, it can be understood as a class which has association properties OR as an association which has class properties.